Peter opened his eyes, but was too nauseous to turn his head towards the voices. The ceilings and walls seemed to be convulsing; the lights yo-yo’d. It was as though the solid framework of the room had turned elastic, walls billowing, ceiling flailing around. He shut his eyes against the delirium, but that was worse: the convulsions continued inside his skull, as though his eyeballs were inflating like balloons, as though the pulpy insides of his face might, any moment, squirt out through his nostrils. He imagined he could feel his brain filling up with — or being drained of — some vile, caustic liquor.
From elsewhere in the cabin, the grunting and scuffling went on, accompanied by deranged laughter.
‘You know, it’s pretty entertaining,’ remarked the mocking, sober voice, removed from the other two, ‘watching you guys flopping around on the floor like a couple of sprayed bugs.’
‘Hey, no fair! Damn system should wake us all up at the same time. Then we’d see who’s most fit.’
‘Well… ’ (The superior voice again.) ‘Somebody has to be first, I guess. To make the coffee and check that everything’s working.’
‘So go check, Tuska, and leave me and BG to slug it out for second place.’
‘Suit yourselves.’ Footsteps. A door opening. ‘You think you’ll have privacy? Dream on, people. I can watch you squirming around on the surveillance cameras. Smile!’
The door clicked shut.
‘Thinks the sun shines out of his ass,’ muttered a voice from the floor.
‘That’s ’cause you’re always kissin’ it, man.’
Peter lay still, gathering his strength. Intuitively he understood that his body would settle back to normal in its own good time, and that there was nothing gained in trying to function too soon, unless you were the competitive type. The two men on the floor continued to grunt and giggle and heave themselves about, in defiance of the chemicals that had allowed them to survive the Jump.
‘You gonna be the first one standing or am I?’
‘I’m up already, bro… see?’
‘You’re so full of shit, man. That ain’t standing, that’s leaning. Let go the bench.’
Sound of a body falling to the floor; more laughter.
‘See you do better, bro… ’
‘Easy.’
Sound of another body falling to the floor; dopey hysterics.
‘Forgot how bad it was, man.’
‘Nothing a half dozen cans of Coke won’t fix.’
‘Fuck that, man. A line of coke and you’re talkin’.’
‘If you want more drugs after this, you must be dumber than I thought.’
‘Just stronger, bro, just stronger.’
And so it went on. The two men sparred with each other, expelling bravado into the atmosphere, biding for time, until they were both on their feet. They grunted and panted as they rummaged in plastic bags, mocked each other’s taste in clothing, put on shoes, tested their bipedalism by walking around. Peter lay in his crib, breathing shallowly, waiting for the room to stop moving. The ceiling had calmed down, at least.
‘Yo, bro.’
A large face loomed into his range of view. For a second, Peter couldn’t recognise it as human: it seemed to be attached to the neck upside-down, with eyebrows on the chin and a beard at the top. But no: it was human, of course it was human, just very different from his own. Dark brown skin, a shapeless nose, small ears, beautiful brown eyes tinged with red. Neck muscles that could raise and lower an elevator in a twenty-storey shaft. And those eyebrow-like things on the chin? A beard. Not a full, furry beard, but one of those finely-sculpted fashion statements you could buy from a fancy barber. Years ago, it must have looked like a neat line drawn with a black felt-tip marker, but the man was middle-aged now, and the beard was patchy and speckled with grey. Advancing baldness had left him with just a few knobs of frizz on his head.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ croaked Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’
‘BG, bro,’ said the black man, extending a hand. ‘You want I pull you outta there?’
‘I… I might prefer to lie here a bit longer.’
‘Don’t wait too long, bro,’ said BG, with a radiant white grin. ‘You shit your pants, and it’s a small ship.’
Peter smiled, unsure of whether BG meant this as a warning of what might happen or as an observation of what had already happened. The viscose swaddling of the crib felt damp and heavy, but it had felt that way even when the woman in the lab coat first wrapped him in it.
Another face swung into view. Sunburnt white, fiftyish, with thinning grey hair cut to a military bristle. Eyes as bloodshot as BG’s, but blue and full of painful childhood and messy divorce and violent upheavals in employment.
‘Severin,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Artie Severin. We gotta get you out of there, pal. Sooner you start drinking, sooner you’ll feel like a human being.’
BG and Severin lifted him out of the crib as though they were extracting a newly purchased piece of equipment from its box: not exactly gently, but with sufficient care not to tear or break anything. His feet barely touched the floor as they carried him out of the room, down a short corridor and into a bathroom. There they stripped him of the gauzy loincloth he’d worn for the last month, sprayed him with blue foam from neck to ankles, and wiped him down with paper towels. A large transparent plastic waste bag got filled halfway to the top with blue and brown muck before they were finished.
‘Is there a shower?’ he asked, when it was over and he still felt sticky. ‘I mean, with water?’
‘Water is gold, bro,’ said BG. ‘Every drop we got, goes into here.’ He tapped his throat. ‘It don’t do nobody no good out there.’ And he nodded towards the wall, the outer shell of the ship, the barrier between them and the vast airless emptiness in which they were suspended.
‘Sorry,’ said Peter. ‘That was naïve of me.’
‘Naïve’s not a problem,’ said BG. ‘We all gotta ride the learning curve. I done this trip once before. First time I didn’t know shit.’
‘You’ll have all the water you want when we get to Oasis,’ said Severin. ‘Right now, you’d better drink some.’
Peter was handed a plastic bottle with a resealable nipple. He took a big swig and, ten seconds later, fainted.
His recovery from the Jump took him longer than he would have liked. He would have liked to spring up like a momentarily winded boxer, and impress the other men. But the other men shook off the effects of the Jump rapidly and got busy doing whatever it was that they were doing, while he lolled helpless in a bunk, occasionally managing a sip of water. Before take-off he’d been warned that he would feel as though he’d been disassembled and put back together again, which was not exactly how the Jump worked, scientifically speaking, but was indeed the way it felt.
He spent the afternoon… well, no, those words made no sense, did they? There was no such thing as afternoon, morning or night here. In the darkened room where BG and Severin had stowed him after cleaning him up, he woke occasionally from his woozy slumber and looked at his watch. The numbers were only symbols. Real time would not resume until he had ground underfoot, and there was a sun rising and setting.
Once he got to Oasis, there would be facilities for sending a message to Beatrice. ‘I’ll write to you every day,’ he’d promised. ‘Every single day, if God allows me.’ He tried to imagine what she might be doing at this moment, how she might be dressed, whether she would have her hair pinned up or hanging loose over her shoulders. That was what his watch was for, he realised: not to tell him anything useful about his own situation, but to allow him to imagine Beatrice existing in the same reality as himself.